“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!” he roared in excitement about halfway through the ABC News-hosted debate. “We’re not going to allow it to be used against a fellow American anymore.”

O’Rourke said this after debate moderator David Muir of “ABC World News Tonight” asked him if he was serious about remarks he’d made last month concerning so-called “assault weapons.”

“Americans who own AR-15s and AK-47s will have to sell them to the government,” he’d said at a campaign event in Charlottesville, Virginia. “We’re not going to allow them to stay on our friends, to show up in our communities, to be used against us in our synagogues, our churches, our mosques, our Walmarts, our public places.”

I was asked how I’d address people’s fears that we will take away their assault rifles.

I want to be clear: That’s exactly what we’re going to do. Americans who own AR-15s and AK-47s will have to sell their assault weapons. All of them. pic.twitter.com/YbnSsz3bVy

“I am [proposing confiscation] if it’s a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield,” he said. “If the high impact, high velocity round, when it hits your body, shreds everything inside of your body, because it was designed to do that, so that you would bleed to death on a battlefield and not be able to get up and kill one of our soldiers …”

“When we see that being used against children, and in Odessa, I met the mother of a 15-year-old girl who was shot by an AR-15, and that mother watched her bleed to death over the course of an hour because so many other people were shot by that AR-15. In Odessa and Midland, there weren’t enough ambulances to get to them in time. Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

Technically, he wasn’t wrong. A recent Politico/Morning Consult poll found that a 70 percent majority of all Americans — including even a notable 55 percent of Republicans — support a ban on so-called “assault weapons.”

“An assault weapon is whatever is covered by an assault weapon ban,” Reason magazine’s Jacob Sullum pointed out earlier this year. “The criteria that are used to identify assault weapons are things that have little or nothing to do with how useful or how deadly an assault weapon is in the hands of a mass murderer.”

In fact, guns are invariably classified as “assault weapons” by Democrats not based on their functionality but rather on their appearances.

“To illustrate this point, compare the Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle with the AR-15,” Reason notes. “One looks like a hunting rifle and the other looks like a military weapon. Although the rifles have different manufacturers and lineages, for all practical purposes they are identical. They fire at the same rate, they can fire the same caliber of ammunition, and because they have similar barrel lengths, the ballistics are almost identical. But only one is an ‘assault weapon.'”

Exactly.

Because of this “yuge” discrepancy, the argument could be made that the results of the recent Politico/Morning Consult are moot.

Some Second Amendment advocates have even suggested that perhaps the poll’s respondents interpreted the question about “assault weapons” as follows: “Would you be in favor of banning the unique type of weapons that are used in mass shootings and that have no other purpose?”

It’s certainly a possibility.

Not included among the alleged majority of Americans who support a so-called “assault weapons” ban is Texas state Rep. Briscoe Cain. In a since-removed tweet reportedly posted during Thursday night’s debate, he wrote, “My AR is ready for you Robert Francis.”

It was clear to anyone who read it that Cain was saying, in effect, “If you come for my constitutionally guaranteed right to own firearms, then expect trouble.” What’s not so clear is whether his tweet constituted a threat. O’Rourke thought it did.

This is a death threat, Representative. Clearly, you shouldn’t own an AR-15—and neither should anyone else. pic.twitter.com/jsiZmwjMDs